In the past, when motion of a receiver receiving a digital broadcast made reception of the program being viewed/listened to with the receiver impossible due to a drop in the receiving level etc., the viewer or listener had to perform manual operations on the receiver to scan the channels for ‘broadcasting stations receivable if the present position is within their reception service areas’, one station at a time, and decide whether each station had the same program content, i.e., decide whether the broadcasting station found was an ‘affiliated station’. If a broadcasting station detected in the channel search did not have the same program as the program that was being viewed/listened to, it was necessary to scan the channels again and repeat the process of detecting the next broadcasting station—a troublesome procedure.
To ameliorate this troublesome procedure, a receiver disclosed in patent document 1, for example, includes a receiving unit for switchably receiving identical programs broadcast in different frequency bands in different areas, a storage unit for storing a history of the switching of the frequency bands of the program in the receiving unit, and a control unit for, when the receiver moves from one area to another area, having the receiving unit switch to receive the program broadcast in a different frequency band in accordance with the switching history stored in the storage unit. In the receiver described in patent document 1, when the receiver moves from a first area to a second area, the control unit selects a different frequency band where the same program is most likely to be broadcast in accordance with the switching history stored in the storage unit, consequently shortening the time until the receiving unit can receive the same program.